City Tour Thought Leadership Series: The Art of Lead Acquisition

Beth Perry

Bronto City Tour made a successful stop in Sydney last week, and we’re gearing up for a full day in London on November 10. We know not everyone can join us, so we thought we’d bring a little of the experience (and our speakers’ expertise) to you.

We’re very lucky to have some of today’s top commerce marketers sharing their stories and strategies with us at the event, so we took the opportunity to pose a few questions to them ahead of time to get their thoughts on several hot topics and industry tactics.

Today’s topic: Lead acquisition.

What do you see as the most successful strategy for adding new high-quality contacts to your list?

As much as everyone thinks pop-ups for email collection are annoying, they do work, but you need to test different strategies and find the one that works for you. For Envelopes.com, certain triggers, such as being on a specific product or category page or displaying pop-ups before abandonment, have worked wonders! When you know what actions your visitors have taken to sign up for your list, you already have a nice starting point to initiate your first conversation.

Particularly since Björn Borg is both a public figure and a sport fashion brand, the welcome series has been extremely helpful for introducing new contacts to our business and heritage. The contacts have fulfilled a number of emails before going into the regular newsletter list, and we believe this is a great way to add quality leads to our database.

It sounds obvious, but we’ve always focused on encouraging existing store or online customers to join the email programme. We have over 800 stores in the UK, and we know there are still huge numbers of store customers who shop regularly but haven’t signed up. Some aren’t even aware that we have a website! But our stores are high-footfall and low-time environments, so it’s a challenge to find ways to encourage these sign-ups without causing disruption and delays within the store.

How effective are social media platforms as lead acquisition tools?

For us, as a lifestyle-oriented brand, it’s the most important storefront. We’re not special in that sense by any means, but when it comes to showing off our culture and our customers, social media, especially image-focused platforms, has proven to be key when it comes to expressing our brand story in a format that is relatable.

They can work really well, but for us, it has to be incentivised. In all our advertising and acquisition work on social media, incentives – competitions, prize draws, giveaways – always work. It still has to be fun, relevant and engaging, so we often avoid a hard sell. Backing any social media campaign with some targeted advertising money is essential.

Social media, specifically Facebook, is so powerful in the ways you can target potential consumers. I will say that B2C targeting is a bit easier on Facebook than B2B, but LinkedIn also provides something similar but for a higher price. The direct attribution of social media depends on your type of product or service, whether you have immediate purchase decisions being made or your conversions are long tail and require a lengthy research phase.

Want to hear more from these and other industry thought leaders? There’s still time to register to join us in London!

Not in the area? Stay tuned for the next posts in our City Tour blog series, and consider meeting us in Las Vegas next April for Bronto Summit 2017! With more than 50 incredible sessions from a lineup of talented commerce marketers and Bronto experts, you’re sure to leave with a number of new ideas to help you generate even more revenue and make the most of your marketing plan. Register today!